30 Jackie 1930–1962
baccalaureate, he was really upset. He worked hard all summer,
and got into the habit of rising very early, so that he passed the
exams in September. ‘All of a sudden, he changed completely,’ his
brother René remembers.
Thereupon, Jackie left the Lycée Ben Aknoun to enter the Lycée
Émile-Félix-Gautier, a respected institution in the centre of Algiers.
His philosopher teacher, Jean Choski, was particularly famous for
his ‘unforgettable voice, dragging out the fi nal syllables of words
and adding shovelfuls of grave and circumfl ex accents to the
vowels’, as well as for the big black umbrella from which, accord-
ing to some people, he was never separated. ‘If anyone asks you
why you have come to Émile-Félix-Gautier, you’ll say that it’s to
do philosophy with Choski!’ he announced in his fi rst class. In the
view of one of his ex-pupils, he was a ‘real character, unpredict-
able, alluring, eccentric, a poser at times, sometimes even a real
pain, but an educator, powerfully original, sparkling with intel-
ligence, and gifted with thoughts that were at once clear, elegant,
and precise. And at times he could be dazzling: what fl ights of elo-
quence (especially on Kant)! A real philosopher, a great one’^32 We
have no information about any precise infl uence this teacher had
on Derrida. We merely know that, among the books Derrida read,
the works of Bergson and Sartre were those that left the deepest
impression.
It was during his fi nal year at school that Jackie’s mother, who
had long been suff ering from attacks of renal colic, underwent
major surgery. The stone was so big that she had to have a whole
kidney removed. In his personal notes for 1976, Derrida returned
elliptically but very signifi cantly to the importance of this event in
his relationship with his mother, marking as it did the end of a long
period of tension.
My mother’s operation.
I date my ‘reconciliation’ with her back to that time. Describe
it in very concrete detail. The frequent visits to the clinic. Fear
during the operation. She was surprised and touched by my
solicitude. Mine too. End of a war. Report transformed into
‘studies’, etc. etc.^33At the time he took his baccalaureate, Jackie had only a rather
vague idea of what he wanted to do next. Ever since he had been
fourteen or fi fteen, he had felt sure he would have to write – lit-
erature, if possible. But since he did not for a moment imagine
that anyone could earn a living that way, becoming a teacher in
the humanities had long seemed to him to be ‘the only possible, if
not desirable, job’.^34 With the discovery of philosophy, the project
developed somewhat: